Comedian Bill Maher weighed in on the Oval Office blowup between President Trump, Vice President Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, calling the contentious meeting the “The Real Housewives of The White House.”
“It devolved into this shouting match, which I’m sure Trump thinks is good TV,” Maher said during Friday night’s edition of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
The talk show host then showed a clip of a heated exchange where Trump told Zelensky not to “tell us what we’re going to feel” after Zelensky argued the U.S. has not felt the direct consequences of the Russia-Ukraine war due to its distance from Eastern Europe.
Maher then characterized the spat as “The Real Housewives of the White House,” referring to the popular reality television show that first aired in 2006.
Trump and Zelensky’s bilateral meeting at the White House on Friday went off the rails when Vance contended that the president was deploying diplomacy to seal the peace agreement and later hammered Ukraine’s president over being “disrespectful” for debating with the two leaders in front of news outlets.
The vice president said Zelensky “should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to his conflict.”
Zelensky’s argument that the U.S. has not felt the ramifications of the conflict due to it being on another continent sparked a strong response from Trump.
“You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards,” Trump told Zelensky, again warning Ukraine’s head that he is “gambling with the lives of millions of people, you’re gambling with World War III … and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country, that’s backed you far more than a lot of people said they should have.”
Maher summed up the confrontational huddle in one word: “deplorable.”
“Great day to be an American. I mean, my first thought is he’s having this big browbeating with a guy who speaks English as a second language. I just— it’s just. I mean. So we’re all agreed this is deplorable,” Maher said Friday night. “You know, I’ve tried to not use the word deplorable as much as I can, but when it’s deplorable, it’s deplorable!”
“And anyone who likes it. I mean, it’s a deplorable point of view,” he added.
Hours after the White House meeting, Trump argued that Zelensky is not ready to make a peace agreement and later told reporters that Kyiv’s leader “overplayed his hand.”
Zelensky, hours after the fallout, said on Fox News that he will not apologize for the meeting, which, in his view, was bad for both sides.
Ukraine’s president tried to repair the relationship between Kyiv and Washington on Saturday morning, writing that a lasting peace deal would be “difficult” to pull off with U.S. involvement.
“It will be difficult without the U.S. support. But we can’t lose our will, our freedom, or our people. We’ve seen how Russians came to our homes and killed many people,” Zelensky wrote Saturday morning on X. “Nobody wants another wave of occupation. If we cannot be accepted to NATO, we need some clear structure of security guarantees from our allies in the U.S.”
